#i think the key difference is that bo-katan doesn't accidentally let maul take over mandalore;

[ryehouses]

I don't remember clone wars SUPER well, but wasn't Bo's whole goal to get Viszla on the Mando throne, not Maul? She did accidentally help Maul get there, but it was never her goal, and she did immediately fight to dethrone him. Like Qui-gon is pretty responsible for creating Darth Vader but we don't blame him. Am I missing something???

hold on let me put on my philosophy hat! star wars meta under the cut, because this is way better than looking at contracts:

tldr, for folks that don't want to read a treatise: clone wars era bo-katan is like the shocked pikachu meme, in which bo-katan is running around with a bunch of terrorists, doing terrorist things, and then is surprised when doing those terrorist things has led to, like, the socio-political collapse of mandalore's government. she's the "'but i didn't think the leopards would eat my face!' sobbed the woman who voted for the face-eating leopards party" woman, except the face-eating leopard is a sith lord with attachment issues and moderate megalomania who kills bo-katan's sister to make his already desperately sad archenemy even sadder. she's an australia that has introduced a non-native cane toad to control a native beetle in order to more efficiently maximize a brutal capitalist system and now is upset that her house is full of huge toads with no natural predators. the toads are poisonous and the ecosystem is collapsing. i got carried away here, but you get the gist.

too long did read, for my reasoning: in this case, i'd argue that no matter what bo-katan's reason for going along with the maul plan is -- possibly installing pre vizsla to the throne of mandalore, but mostly just destablizing the neutral mandalorian government -- her reasoning is secondary to the action because she is fully and consciously participating in death watch, which is doing terrible things (not just on mandalore, mind; there's a whole little arc with ahsoka and... the one kid... lux? where death watch has just casually taken over an enslaved a random settlement because they can and think that they deserve to).

whatever bo-katan's original intentions were, be they good intentions (also arbitrary; the neutral mandalorians would disagree than any attempt to return to mandalore's more violent ways is not good, while dw could and does argue that they're just upholding their cultural traditions and fending off a government they didn't elect or support, how can that not be a good?) or not, intention is secondary to an action that does harm, especially to an action that does intentional harm. maul's name, like, means intentional harm. it's very on the nose. even if maul usupring vizsla was a surprise, the whole "building a super crime syndicate" thing is objectively a bad, immoral action, and imo it's pretty hard to "the ends justify the means" that away just because bo-katan didn't mean for what maul did to happen.

also, leaving morality aside for a minute, imo bo-katan holds additional culpability for what maul does because she knows that it's a bad idea to ally with him from the start, but knuckles under and lets it happen in order to get what she wants from the situation. i could be misremembering, but i'm pretty sure she knows that sith lords are bad news and tells pre vizsla as much, but ultimately falls in line because she wants what maul is offering. that's a conscious choice that she makes.

i think it's also important to remember that she does not abandon death watch because she thinks that maul's actions are immoral or bad -- she leaves because she doesn't want an outsider to rule mandalore. she says it out loud, to the viewer -- it's only after maul takes over and betrays pre vizsla that she bolts and lets obi-wan go, presumably to that obi-wan can rally some jedi to help him pry maul off of mandalore.

(I'm not touching the qui-gon thing until after I've shared it with the discord, because we've honestly never seen a "qui-gon is pretty responsible for darth vader" take and have to dissect it over the course of 4-5 buisness days.)

#a meta far far away #ask box #i think the key difference is that bo-katan doesn't accidentally let maul take over mandalore; #she intentionally agrees to ally with him in order to get what she wants and then underestimates maul's ability to rock pre vizsla's shit #yes pre vizsla is the one who makes the alliance in the first place #but bo-katan goes along with it and only bails AFTER she realizes that dw collectively miscalculated #all of this to say: bo is a complicated awful person and disney trying to pretend that she's not awful does a disservice to her character